Eyewear is very glad to welcome to these pages, today, the Icelandic poet and novelistGerður Kristný(pictured).Kristný was born in 1970, and has a degree in French and comparative literature from the University of Iceland. She is a successful children’s novelist, as well as one of her country’s leading poets. She is married, and has a family.

She travels widely to international festivals, such as the recent Maastricht International Poetry Nights (October 28-30) where I met her as a fellow reader. I was impressed with her reading style, and the look of her spare, decisive poems on the page. She explores the Sagas, religious images, myth, feminist concerns, relationships, and the icy landscape of her home, in her minimalist, clipped, ironic, and suggestive poems, which contain the proverbial nine-tenths of their force and heft beneath their surfaces.